Jeremy Corbyn is worried about after-work “drinks events” on the grounds that they “discriminate against mothers”. For that reason, companies should ban them, argues Labour’s accidental leader. The threadbare nature of his argument is completely laid to waste when Corbyn tries to flesh it out. The culture of work socialising “benefits men who don’t feel the need to be at home looking after their children and it discriminates against women who will want to, obviously, look after the children that they have got”. Just so you know I am not trying to make Corbyn look foolish – I think he and his supporters are perfectly capable of doing that on a regular basis without any guidance from me – I used his actual words which are about as clear as mud.
My own experiences in life have not led me to the conclusion that men “don’t feel the need to be at home looking after the children” and essentially leave all that stuff to women whilst they go out on the lash. Perhaps it is just the circles I move in but the couples I know are not just men on the piss and women slaving over a hot stove. They have far more of a partnership. In my civil service life, I never went to a “drinks event” after work. I am not sure what a “drinks event” actually is. I certainly had the odd beer after work but only if it fitted in with my partner and our children’s demands and priorities too. I stayed in when my partner went out with her friends so it was far from one way traffic.
There is certainly an argument to be had about direct and indirect discrimination against women. We’re only partly down the road to equality and, yes, we need to do far more. What seems to be nothing more than an anecdote dressed up as fact by the leader of the opposition does not strike me as being a sensible way of proceeding.
Perhaps it is the company Corbyn keeps, people who come from the educated middle and sometimes upper classes who have no idea how ordinary people live their lives. Corbyn’s spin doctor, the multimillionaire Seumas Milne went to the exclusive Westminster private school and sent his own children to selective grammar schools. The millionaire Jon Lansman who owns the shady Momentum political group that backs Corbyn went to Highgate private school. Corbyn’s henchman John McDonnell went to grammar school (and employs Corbyn’s grammar school educated son Sebastian as his chief of staff) as did the useless Diane Abbott who sent her own son to private school and Corbyn himself who attended the prestigious Adams grammar school in Shropshire. Setting aside my own personal views on grammar and private schools, I have always wondered if these so called principled lefties have any real connection with the real world. Corbyn only seems to address people who already agree with him, so how could he?
Corbyn himself has attended scores of rallies this summer, attended by thousands from his cult following. Do you think they all returned to Clifton Village to put their children to bed after fawning over his every word or did some of them call in the local pub for a swift pint on the way? And was it the men who went to the pub and the women went home, as Corbyn put it, “to look after the children that they have got”?
I see this concern as being an afterthought from Corbyn because this was the same man who appointed men to the shadow jobs for the four great offices of state when he was elected to “lead” the Labour Party and whose answer for women being safe on trains was for them to have separate carriages. Better late than never, I suppose. Maybe he is beginning to get it, after all?
The idea that “drinks events discriminate against mothers” is an opinion, not an evidence-based fact and I’d say it was more than slightly patronising too.
Concentrate on the real issues, Mr Corbyn, and nonsensical fluff like this will sort itself out. In the real world, women are strong, they are decision-makers, they are leaders and they keep families together. Not in Corbyn’s Labour Party, perhaps, where women are trolled, threatened and abused, but in the real world, outside the Islington bubble.
